09/02/2026
The Boards that End Up Here
Every engineering organization eventually meets a board that resists. Sixteen-plus layers. Blind and buried vias. Fine-pitch geometry under thick conformal coating. One surviving unit, no documentation, no margin for a destroyed layer.
Those boards tend to end up in Conifer, Colorado — sent by some of the most capable engineering groups in defense, aerospace, and medical electronics. Thirty years ago, scanner-based PCB reverse engineering was not a product category. There was no software to buy, so we wrote it. No reliable way to delaminate a multilayer board without destroying fine traces, so we developed one. ScanFAB and the Precision Material Removal System (PMRS) exist because real boards demanded them — and today they run in 50+ countries.
Follow a Board Through the Shop
It starts with the BOM. The board is depopulated component by component — reference designators, values, tolerances, part numbers, datasheets where they can be found. This comes first for a simple reason: depopulation produces the bare board, and there is no delaminating a populated one. The BOM is accepted as a first draft and the work moves on, because the rest of the process is built to audit it.
Then delamination and scanning. The board comes down layer by layer, each captured as a high-resolution, NIST-calibrated image. Three decades of stackups teach you the point where one more pass costs a feature.
The images become Ge**er. Reconstructing Ge**er 274X from calibrated raster means recognizing plane splits, thermal reliefs, and registration artifacts that automated conversion alone will miss. The result matches the original copper down to the mil — every layer, including the inner ones.
The Ge**er yields pick-and-place, and the tracks converge at the netlist. Our proprietary netlist software, ConvertPLUS ARE, uses the centroid to locate every part, backtracks connectivity through the Ge**er, and applies pin numbering from the BOM’s datasheets — producing netlists in IPC-D-356A, IPC-2581, and ODB++.
Then the netlist is interrogated. An AI-assisted analysis backend works out what the circuits are actually doing and checks whether the netlist and BOM describe a design that makes electrical sense — surfacing part misidentifications before a schematic is ever drawn.
Last, the schematic. Our exclusive conversion software compiles netlist and BOM into native schematics for OrCAD, Altium, PADS, and other ECAD systems, plus an intelligent PDF a designer can trace net by net. A fully editable native board layout is available as an add-on.
The schematic is also the final audit: an electrical engineer reads it the way a designer would and judges whether the circuit is rational. That is the fullest validation a BOM can receive short of building the board and powering it on.
Read the entire blog post here:
https://scancad.net/the-boards-that-end-up-here/
